Fig. 3

Data acquisition. a Block diagram depicting the hyperspectral code design corresponding to the LabVIEW user interface (shown in Additional file 1: Figure S2). When the user selects the “start” button in the user interface, the code enters the “Initiate Software” mode, launching the software for both the piezoelectric stage (PI Physik Instrumente stage software) and the spectrometer (LF Lightfield, Princeton Instruments software for detector system). Once the parameters have been set for the experiment in the user interface and the user advances the code into the “Acquire Data” section, the code goes through N cycles of data acquisition and stage movement. b Representation of an as-acquired stack of 2D matrices